On music alone... I have 774 albums on my library, of which I probably legit own like 20-30. At a conservative 10€ per album, that'd be around 7500€ on music. I also have 81 series, of which some of them are dropout.tv, which I'm legit paying for, so let's say 75 series that I pirate. I have no idea of the real cost, but let's say each series is 100€ in bluray. That's another 7500€. I also have 202 movies, of which I own some, but not in bluray, so let's assume I'd have to buy all of them. At, let's say, 20€/movie, that's another 4000€.

So, in total I'd say I have around 19000€ on pirated content. There's no way I could pay for all of it lol, but I also haven't watched/listened to all of it, so I wouldn't have bought it even if I could.

Edit: oh and I forgot about videogames. But I don't pirate many of those lately anyway, since steam is so convenient, and I also have a big catalogue of free games from Epic. But I did pirate maaaany in the past. When I was a kid I would rent them and then download a "nocd" crack lol, those were the days.

I'd be fucked ....

Currently around 70TB .. over 2k movies, 1.8k TV shows (63.000+ episodes) and around 66.000 tracks by over 900 artists ...

Depends, are we talking the highest retail price? Or clearance prices?

Let's take steam as an example, before steam existed I was a big pirate. Now that steam exists and it's so convenient I basically buy every game. But I only buy them after wish listing them and waiting until they get to like $5 or less. So I'm a bargain basement patient gamer.

For other things I'm the same way, so what would be the actual cost of a cheapskates pirate library? Flea market clearance DVD prices would be fair

I only pirate what is unavailable.

And things that are supposed to be bad, like the new Snow White movie, which made me still feel robbed.

I’m like in like 200$ maximum

Let us not admit to possible crimes on teh Internet.

The question is up to interpetation.

The $5000 estimate is if the law catched up to me right now after the fact. For me personally, if piracy weren't a thing, I probably wouldn't have spend much on entertainment and would've just been reading wikis for the story, and only pay to watch something if the story is really good and has good reviews. 90% of the stuff I watched now would probably never would've watched in that other timeline.

As for video games, I would've only been play free-to-play games and watching youtube playthroughs.

Probably wouldn't understand a lot of memes. But then again, if piracy werent a thing, many other people also wouldn't understand those memes.

Nah fuck it. I yaRrr'ed the pirates of the caribbean movies, fuck the mouse.

Participating in this community is practically admission already.

There are millions of us in the US, tens of millions of us worldwide. Are they gonna sue/jail us all?

I owe my entire life to piracy.

I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I've ever held are entirely attributable to it.

Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I'm also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.

Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But... just sayin'. There's more than one face to this coin.

As for media - music, movies and such, I've almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I've ever consumed. Never. And I still don't.

I make no apology for this: it's theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM'ed, force shit I don't want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I'm a shameless freeloader.

The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors... It's just like that. I want writers to get paid.

Depends. If we take from when I was a kid? Probably something in the hundreds of thousands or even in the millions. I pirated pretty much everything because I lived in a very small town with no electronics shop so I couldn't even buy games.

However, in the last 8 years or so? I find that I rarely pirate games anymore. Bundles, steam sales and refunds allow me to buy without worrying about liking the game.

Music is also something I don't pirate anymore. I'm not one needing thousands of tracks, but rather a small and select collection. So I occasionally buy from bandcamp or other services so I can keep the music I want in my jellyfin server.

Films and shows are a different thing tho. At home whave netflix, so for most stuff we go there, but if something's not there, I'll pirate it. So... idk but... some hundreds? I'm not a fan of movies and most of the stuff I watch (which is not a lot) is on netflix.

Hard to tell, guesstimate €1,500.

I really only download music, mostly individual songs. I use sites like himovies.to for movies, and then if I like something enough, I buy a DVD, if available.
And some few "mod apks", which yes, are a bit shady. I don't know how to do that myself, so I just run them through VirusTotal and hope for the best if it's all green (false negatives). Stuff like KineMaster because I am procrastinating to learn using Kdenlive, MLUSB Mounter and some games.

I haven't purchased any media or software (excl. donations) that doesn't come on a physical medium.

I think for books its easier to attribute credit to one person compared to like dozens of actors and extra crew to make a city scene in the movie look populated, or like multiple members of a band. Books are just one person responsible for all of it. If the author is good you support them. Where as, sometimes a movie is good, but then one of those producers/script-writers/actors turns out rotten with bad politics (like bigotry) then your support is kinda of goes towards their royalties and fame. With one person, its much easier to research their politics to support them, and simultaneouly easier to organize a boycott writers for their bigotry.

I see no problem with learning to use some expensive software by pirating it only to then get a job using that software (paid with a corporate license). Before many companies had "education editions" of software, that was how you learned.

How do you even start to quantify something like a TV show? Without piracy would you have had subscription services, seen it free when it came on local TV and/or bought a box set of it? Similar situations exist for other media too, which "full price" are we talking about?

Nice try FBI.

Outdated image, these days we just remote into the FBI office, no FBI jacket needed.

This kind of thinking is what the mpaa and others want pirating framed as. Very very little of what's pirated would have been paid for at all had it not been available. I've paid to see sequels for movies that have pirated and have bought books based on series I've downloaded that I never would have bothered to explore if I had to buy them originally.

This is tough to answer, because a lot of pirated stuff is literally priceless, i.e., can't be bought at all.

I'd be happy to pay for the recent Ace Combat 5 and 6 upscaled ports, but they were only available briefly with preorders for AC7 on consoles I don't have. They haven't been sold outside of that brief window several years ago. Even if you tracked down unopened copies from 2019 and bought them from third parties, the license codes they contained expired long ago.

Fortunately, the Ace Combat community has put a lot work into making emulation work. The older games are playable, just not in a way you can pay money for.

Unclear. Cause I don't tell